In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper jewish burial.

25 years after spending their holidays at a summer camp in 1980s socialist Hungary, the campers confont the demons of the past.

In Budapest in 1957, one year after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution, a young Jewish boy whose mother has raised him to believe that his father will return from the camps has his hopes shattered when a brutish stranger appears on the doorstep to take his family back.